The Aznalubma Issue Link to heading
To better express my point of view, I have to start from a personal experience.
Recently I decided to stop writing the blog Aznalubma.it altogether. Not that it was particularly alive to begin with. The whole thing started with the best intentions. I was a young rescuer, freshly qualified as a trainer, and I felt an irrepressible desire to share my passion. Even back then, in 2015, blogs were already in their unstoppable decline. From my perspective, however, blogs offered advantages that no social network could provide — in particular, the ability to present an argument in a linear way, using headings, sections, and various images. Equally important was the ability to find articles on specific topics by searching on Google (I wonder how many of you have ever been offered a Facebook post as a search result).
I thought I could combine the expository potential of a website with the distribution power of social media. I was wrong — and not by a little.
It was clear from the start that the vast majority of traffic to the blog came from the social platforms where the link was shared, and the most appalling thing was that shares were in a 1/10 ratio compared to visits. This could only mean one thing: people shared based on the title alone.
It didn’t surprise me all that much — it was a largely predictable phenomenon — but I didn’t imagine it would be in such proportions. It irritated me a lot, especially because I spent days collecting data, consulting with people who knew more than me to put together a few columns of content, which, most of the time, wasn’t even read.
To be honest, there were some who did perhaps read my articles — I’m talking about people from other blogs, who couldn’t care less about licensing and did a copy/paste of the content, gracing you (if you were lucky) with a link to the original article with a tiny “here” at the bottom of the page.
The harsh truth is that an article with no real substance, titled “There are normal people and others who are angels without wings: they’re called rescuers!” gets infinitely more engagement than one about the advantages of using a scoop stretcher over a spinal board.
So are blogs truly dead? Link to heading
I admit that my experience, to date, has been terrible — full of frustration and anger. Yet the premises remain very valid; in fact, more have been added over time.
For some years now, social media, besides being an enormous engine for content, has also become a ruthless censor. Content filtering often acts like a blunt axe — for example, a photo with even a minimal amount of blood (posted for educational purposes) risks being completely hidden from the feed. I use this example rather than talking about pages being shut down, because what’s emerging is something approaching ideological censorship. Everything that goes against the “Community Guidelines” gets deleted, and whoever proposed such content gets “sanctioned.”
I think that in today’s world there is still a place for blogs — the only true tool for freedom of expression, free from the pure logic of content for commercial purposes. It sounds a bit Marxist, and maybe it is, but I think it’s objectively true.
I’ll use the blog for anything, whatever topic I want to cover, without worrying about how a potential “fan” would take the reading. It’s mostly for me — writing helps organize my thoughts, to form a more structured idea.
So I welcome you to my personal dark forest, full of rambling speeches!
P.S. The content (the little I’ve recovered) from the old site will be entirely transferred to a subsection of this blog, to give some pointers to anyone seeking information.